Pioneering
author leaves
San Francisco
but not the
characters he
brought to life
there

Armistead
Maupin Jr. ’ 66
grins as he looks
back on his Chapel
Hill days, when he
was a right-wing
columnist at The
Daily Tar Heel.

“I was the cam-pus conservative,”he said, with alaugh. “It was a conservative, satirical col-umn, if you can imagine such a thing.”The irony is rich for Maupin, who cameout publicly as a gay man a decade later andnow is a celebrated author and screenwriter.Maupin’s iconic Tales of the City series ofeight best-sellers, which grew from his fic-tional serial in the San Francisco Chronicle,have sold more than 6 million copies world-wide in 15 languages. Tales, set in San Fran-cisco, Maupin’s home for the past 40 yearsuntil his recent move to the Southwest, wasa ribald soap opera following the marijuana-fueled adventures of six characters of hetero-sexual, homosexual and bisexual persuasions.Readers couldn’t get enough of the close-knit gang and their friends, with quirky,romping stories from the pleasure-seekingdays of San Francisco in the 1970s, ’80s andbeyond. More seriously, Maupin was amongthe first writers to introduce the scourge ofAIDS into American literature.

“Tales of the City marked the first time
that gay characters were integrated in a sto-ryline in the mainstream of popular fiction,”
Maupin said, with a trace of Southern drawl
reflecting his Raleigh upbringing. “In San
Francisco, people were shocked, even gay
people. You have to understand that at that

time, gay people were simply not permittedinto popular fiction except as homicidalkillers and neutered clowns. I was doingsomething brand new, and I knew that, andit is something for which I’m very proud.”The first three Tales were produced intoan eponymous television miniseries in the1990s starring Olympia Dukakis and LauraLinney. The popular miniseries, which firstaired on PBS and later on Showtime, gar-nered three Emmy nominations and won aPeabody Award, broadcasting’s highesthonor. Dukakis, who won an Acad-emy Award for Moonstruck beforeher Tales work, and Linney, whowas nominated later for an Acad-emy Award for You Can Counton Me and lately has been thehost for PBS’ Masterpiece Classicintroducing the popularminiseries Downton Abbey,remain close to Maupin. Healso authored The Night Lis-tener, a psycho-thriller from2000 that was made into amotion picture starringRobin Williams, anotherlongtime friend, in 2006.

Maupin’s most recent
book is Mary Ann in
Autumn (2010), based on
one of the principal
characters from Tales.

The author is writing his

11th book, The Days of
Anna Madrigal, based on

Armistead Maupin Jr.
’ 66 moved to Santa Fe,
N.M., after decades in
San Francisco.